ASE in 23 months!

We went today for a visit at the tech school Thak is going to be attending for his ASE certification. It's really nice. They partner with a lot of really reputable companies for the mechanics' programs. They are a partner with Matco tools (I think that's what they're called.... They're really good, though. Thak said so.) and every mechanic gets his own set of Matco tools upon graduation, which is important since you need to have your own tools in order to work in the field. Thak has most of that stuff already, but this way he'd have a set for work and a set for home, so it's great. The school also partners with BMW, Mercades Benz, Jaguar, Volvo, and Volkswagen to certify graduates specifically for those brands, and also with Toyota, allowing students to be certified to work on hybrid cars as well as regular ones. Thak has been talking for a while about being a BMW mechanic since that's where the best money is, and this school will allow him to be certified specifically on BMW (in addition to his general certification), and even will help place him with a BMW shop upon graduation.

I don't know if that's what he'll end up doing. Maybe he'll get in there and decide that instead, he wants to work on Mercades, or some other brand which requires its own supplemental certification, but the fact is that the higher end brands are where the real money is for a mechanic, and Thak is the type of mechanic that those types of owners will love. He is meticulous, clean, personable, intelligent, and damn good at what he does. He's the perfect person to work on high-end cars, and that's what he's been talking about doing. I support that fully.

Anyhow, we found out that this course will take him 23 months to complete since he's going at night. It would be 15 months if he did it in the daytime. 23 months puts us one month shy of his ETS date from the Army. That means that when he graduates, he will be on terminal leave, and be ready to be placed in a shop. Even if it ends up taking him longer than that, we've figured out that we will be ok if he gets out, and a couple months later, graduates and starts his civilian job.

This is a big commitment from all of us because it's going to take a lot of his time. Beyond the obvious, classes and such, there is the fact that he'll be trading his weekday Staff Duty shifts as they come up, for weekend shifts instead, so that could cost us as much as one weekend a month. It's worth it, though. This is our ticket out of this Army bullcrap, and we're pretty excited about it.